Mr Reese.

He taught me to look at my father’s rages and my mother’s depression as symptoms of larger, older, issues. Through all the craziness at home his classes taught me to see how my father argued just to argue because it was easier for him than to sit in his own pain and that I didn’t have to follow that path because other choices were available to me. They were the reason that I came to understand that people will only change for themselves and by themselves when they’re ready.

Mr Reese was the Psychology teacher in my High School. This would have been during the mid to late 1970s. He appeared ancient to me at the time so I am guessing that he was about as old as I am now. He focused on Transactional Analysis and some other ideas that were accessible as well as relatively recent for the time. My family was complicated. Most of the families around me were encountering serious difficulties. World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam had scarred generations around the globe and that was reflected around me too. My father was a functional alcoholic and so were all of his friends. Family dysfunctions were tolerated, denied, covered up and left for the next generation to handle. All the while, television and movies painted happy murals over the ugly realities of American family life and promoted the bugs as features.

Before that class, I didn’t know I could step back mentally, while in a conversation, and choose my reaction. That was a groundbreaking concept for my 16 year old self. Up until then I had reacted without a mental chaperone. It was difficult to get the hang of catching myself midstream, but over the years it has been a life-saving skill. I do mean that too, it helped me manage some challenging moments when someone else’s life was in the balance rather than my own. It has though, in all fairness, led to some difficult moments for me in the past. It led to my Training Instructors in Basic Training (USAF) escalating their performative harassment to comical and obvious levels in an attempt to garner emotional reactions from me. People often think I have finished speaking because I consider my reactions and my words carefully, sometimes taking long pauses. It’s not a perfect solution and I have in no way mastered self control. But, even if imperfectly, it has helped me discard many of the patterns that dominated each of the sides of my family line by seeing the patterns and taking the split second to choose whether to continue, ignore, or break them.

Patterns make up our lives: good patterns, bad patterns, old patterns, and new patterns all based on our responses within a few seconds of time. It may only be a few seconds but those are the moments where we can choose which patterns we keep and which ones we toss away. We can’t do anything about how others choose to act but if we can grab that fleeting moment between perception and reaction in our own minds, we can change how we act.

This is from 1972 and it’s a good explanation of part of Transactional Analysis if you’re curious. I am not sure if it will be pay walled.

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/19/archives/the-four-possible-life-positions-1-im-not-ok-youre-ok-2-im-not-ok.html